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Sweden school choice: The country’s disastrous experiment with Milton Friedman and vouchers.

Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

The argument from the right will be that it wasn’t free market enough. That if there had been less government it would have worked.

Clearly, this reform didn’t work in Sweden. Maybe there was some basic flaw in the implementation. Maybe its just a flawed idea.

Unused LotR Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn And Noam Chomsky

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

I followed this from kottke. This is amazing. They capture Chomsky’s brilliance peppered with bullshit perfectly.

Build We Won’t

We can’t simply write a check to the highway fund, we’re told, because that would increase the deficit. And deficits are evil, at least when there’s a Democrat in the White House, even if the government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates. And we can’t raise gas taxes because that would be a tax increase, and tax increases are even more evil than deficits. So our roads must be allowed to fall into disrepair.

How Tea Party tax cuts are turning Kansas into a smoking ruin

The state’s rainy-day fund is dwindling to zero. Month after month, revenue comes in even lower than fiscal officials’ most dire expectations. In the rest of the country, school budgets are finally beginning to recover from the toll of the last recession; in Kansas, they’re still falling. Healthcare, assistance for the poor, courts, and other state services are being eviscerated.

The cynic in me thinks that’s the result they want. To cut taxes on the wealthy and services for the poor and blame the poor economy on immigrants and Obama.

Libertarian Accidentally Shows Obamacare Success

While some of his points have validity, it’s fair to say that the broader narrative conveyed by his work, which certainly lies on the sophisticated end of the anti-Obamacare industry, has utterly failed to prepare his libertarian readers for the possibility that the hated health-care law will actually work more or less as intended.

The better it works, the more likely they will start calling it Romenycare and insist that it works because of capitalism and markets, not government.

That’s the way they square their cognitive bias with reality.

Joblessness not due to skills gap, experts say

The starting wage in manufacturing in the seven-county Pittsburgh region fell from $19,855 in the beginning of 2009, half a year before the end of the Great Recession, to $18,828 this January, or $3,000 less than what the wages would have been if they kept pace with inflation 4 ½ years into the recovery.

“Every time you hear someone say ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ add the phrase ‘at the wage I want to pay’,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., economic research organization.

People are choosing not to work because the pay is too low. Not surprising.

Obama Signs Passive-Aggressive Executive Order

Telling Congress, “It’s O.K., I don’t mind doing everything myself,” President Obama prepared to sign a passive-aggressive executive order on Tuesday.

jtleek/capitalIn21stCenturyinR

The data sets and analysis for Piketty’s Capital In The 21st Century. In R. On github.

Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup

America’s World Cup game against Portugal attracted almost 25 million television viewers in the U.S., eight million more than watched the highest rated World Cup game in 2010, and far more than the average viewership for last year’s World Series or this year’s NBA finals.

This is the kicker:

Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart. That’s why she brings up the metric system. The main reason to resist the metric system isn’t that it’s a bad form of measurement. It’s that it’s a European form of measurement. So it is with soccer.

Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas

the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don’t have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

People who want those tax cuts the most, care the least that they don’t actually work.